IMX Seminar Series - Dynamic polymer networks for engineered living materials

Polymer materials provide solutions to many pressing biomedical, manufacturing, and environmental challenges. However, traditional polymer materials have a limited capacity for rearrangement, presenting difficulties in their processing, use, and recycling. Engineering reversible interactions within polymer networks enables the formation of dynamic and reconfigurable materials, opening new opportunities for use and re-use of polymer networks. In this talk, we will present fundamental insight and applications of dynamic polymer networks with an emphasis on their utility in biomedical applications. We provide a framework for engineering dynamic macromolecular systems by linking molecular behavior at the reversible junctions to macroscopic properties using modeling, spectroscopy, and mechanical characterization. We then present how we use this knowledge to design dynamic biomaterials for scaffolds in photosynthetic living materials for cyanobacteria-based carbon sequestration.

Bio: Prof. Mark Tibbitt is an Associate Professor of Macromolecular Engineering at ETH Zurich, where he has been on the faculty since June 2017. Previously, he was an NIH Postdoctoral Fellow in the laboratory of Prof. Robert Langer in the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He received his B.A. in Integrated Science and Mathematics from Northwestern University, and his Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering at the University of Colorado Boulder under the supervision of Prof. Kristi S. Anseth. His research integrates concepts from chemical engineering, synthetic chemistry, materials science, and biology to rationally design and assemble soft matter for biomedical applications.